All four international airports around Moscow temporarily suspended flights Tuesday as Russian forces intercepted more than 100 Ukrainian drones fired at almost a dozen Russian regions, the Defense Ministry in Moscow said.
“He’s got a real shot at holding it together,” Trump said. “He’s a real leader. He led a charge, and he’s pretty amazing.”The news sparked celebrations across Syria, where the economy has been ravaged by 14 years of civil war and international isolation. But al-Sharaa still faces daunting challenges to building the kind of
Before toppling Assad, al-Sharaa was known by the jihadi nickname he adopted,. His ties to al-Qaida stretch back to 2003, when he joined the insurgency after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.He helped al-Qaida form an offshoot in Iraq that attacked both U.S. forces and the country’s Shiite majority, often using car and truck bombs. He was detained by the U.S. and held for over five years without being charged.
The group’s Iraqi leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, sent al-Sharaa to his native Syria in 2011 after a popular uprising led to a brutal crackdown and eventually a full-blown civil war. There, al-Sharaa established an al-Qaida branch known as the Nusra Front.The two insurgent leaders had a brutal falling out when al-Sharaa refused to join al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State group and remained loyal to al-Qaida’s central leadership. The Nusra Front later battled the Islamic State group.
In his first interview in 2014 on Qatari network Al Jazeera, he kept his face covered and said Syria should be governed by Islamic law, an alarming prospect for the country’s Christian, Alawite and Druze minorities. Al-Sharaa also said he couldn’t trust Gulf and other Arab leaders who he said had sold themselves to Washington to stay in power.
“They paid a tax, these Arab rulers, to the United States,” he said.with cruise and ballistic missiles while the talks have proceeded.
But on Friday, Trump described a brokered settlement on the war as “close.”Western European officials have accused the Kremlin of dragging its feet on peace talks so that Russia’s larger forces, which have battlefield momentum, can seize more Ukrainian land.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed the war in a phone call Sunday with Rubio, the Russian Foreign Ministry said. They focused on “consolidating the emerging prerequisites for starting negotiations,” the statement said, without elaborating.Russia has effectively rejected a U.S. proposal for an immediate and full 30-day halt in the fighting by imposing far-reaching conditions. Ukraine has accepted it, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says.